Dalai Mama Blog

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

My parents gave Ben a record player for his eighth birthday -- an old-fashioned one that looks like a little black suitcase when it's closed -- and he's thrilled. He sits on the floor in front of it, listening intently, watching the warped records wobble around and around, and studying the decaying cardboard covers of my childhood: Pete Seeger and Tom Glazer, Sleeping Beauty and The Aristocats, Annie and The Babysitters (I trust that UB40 and Yaz will catch his attention in later years.) To say that I am reminded of my own childhood would be putting it mildly.

I sat in front of my parents' record player listening to those records -- and, later, also to The Fantasticks and Hair, complete with the requisite hilarity-inducing confusion about "Sodomy" -- for the better part of the entire 1970s. Don't you love seeing in your children the best parts of your own childhood? Those records -- it's the kind of low-tech, good-natured entertainment that makes me feel like I'm living in a black-and-white sitcom. But happily. And without all the repression and foundational undergarments.

But there's something else about it, too -- some way that Ben just seems like such a big kid, even beyond his competent managing of the phonograph's mechanical arm. It's not like he's hunched inside a hooded sweatshirt while angry bass lines thrum through an iPod's headphones; I realize the LP of Carousel hardly bespeaks a turn towards angsty alienatedness. But there is still something increasingly private about his life: the silent devouring of Magic Tree House books in the car; muffledly raucous play dates that happen behind closed doors; entire, mystifying days that unfold opaquely at school; a quiet contemplativeness that does not necessarily find expression in the familiar bubbling-over narratives of a younger time. A younger time such as, for example, 4-and-a-half. "I'm doing that riddle!" Birdy cries from the dinner table. "I won the sandbox one," she says, and ignores my advice ("I think you might do better to start with ‘I one the sandbox.") until she ends up, puzzled, at "I won the sandbox eight." "Let me start over," she says, and Ben gulps the last of his milk, wipes his mouth with a napkin, and leaves us for his record player and The Sound of Music.

I don't regret much -- not really -- but I do have to shake my head when I recall Ben's newborn days, and my constant worry that we were holding him too much. Holding him too much! As if such a thing were possible. And it wasn't even that I minded holding him. I loved holding him. But I worried that we were failing miserably at our God-given parental goal, which was putting the baby down. In retrospect, it's sadly comical, the fantasy that you'll be stuck holding your baby forever.

Because now, with an 8-year-old galumphing through the house, I can't help feeling: If only! And I'm remembering an email my friend Brian wrote me a couple of years ago, about his sons: "There WILL be a day when they don't want to be carried up the stairs ... But the idea that the last time will go unmarked and slip away without being cherished just made me so sad."

I'm trying to hold this in mind when Ben wants me to put his socks on or carry him in from the car when he's actually still awake or stay with him and Birdy while they fall asleep at night. I feel the familiar ripping-away impulse -- the same impulse you might have if, say, a baby had been stapled to your bosom -- and sometimes I act on it, whispering, "I'll check on you guys in a few minutes," and unwinding the arms that are boa-constrictored around my neck, loosening the very claws of love from the hem of my shirt, trotting out before the poor lonely bed-goers can make their emphatic case for my company. But sometimes I just lie there. Let there not be a last time, I think -- a last time that slips away without being cherished.